Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of its second region in the Middle East, located in the UAE.
Announced on Tuesday, advanced cloud technologies are now available to local companies providing increased data residency and decreased latency. These advantages are likely to be utilised across government services, healthcare services, educational services as well as the space programme in the country. Around $5 billion is expected to flow into the UAE over the next 15 years in areas like capital expenditure on data centre construction, operational expenses, facility costs and purchase of goods and services from major businesses.
Liam Maxwell, Director – AWS, explained to Arabian Business that, “This launch is a real recognition of the growth and ambitions of the UAE.”
The decision made to place the infrastructure in the UAE was influenced by key factors, the core of it being “answering customer’s local needs,” a reference to increased demand across public and private, financial sectors, as well as regulated industry sectors and the growth of the cloud transition in the economy.
Amazon is “customer obsessed,” he added, noting that the launch “answering the customer needs very strongly with a large investment.”
He emphasised that “such large investment decisions are not taken lightly,” and that the commitment to the UAE is because they can see “long term prospects of sustainable use of cloud services here.”
When asked about competitive challenges, Maxwell answered with what he describes as an “Amazonian” answer, noting that “our focus is primarily on our customers, we have customer obsession. We know what our competitors are doing, but out principal focus is on what or customers want and that is the main area that we focus on entirely.”
The AWS Middle East (UAE) region consists of three availability zones and joins the existing AWS Middle East (Bahrain) region, functional since July 2019. Availability zones are located close enough to provide low latency but far enough to support business continuity. AWS has 87 availability zones across 27 geographic regions, with plans to launch 21 more zones and seven more regions across the world.
Another reason that the UAE was highlighted as an ideal region for AWS is due to sustainability initiatives that the country is continually implementing. This aligns with Amazon’s commitment to become a more sustainable business, with plans in place to reach zero-net carbon across the firm by 2040.
“One of the big things that UAE is famous for in terms of having an innovative, scalable, but also challenging approaches to innovation in government … that’s why it’s such a great sort of win-win as a market,” Maxwell said.
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